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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Trying to be diplomatic, but this is such an unnecessary snarky, useless response. Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa).

I don't necessarily think they did it "right", and I think the way they set up their "Ethical AI" team was doomed to fail, but at least they did clearly think about the dangers of AI from the start. I can't really say that about any other player.

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AI in Microsoft's hands when they can't even be ethical about how the develop their own OS. Scary stuff.

> Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa).

they were criticized because they are losing competition not because of rollout, their current tech is weaker than ChatGPT.

Their current tech is weaker because they couldn't release the full version due to the additional safeguards (partly to prevent more people claiming their AI is sentient) and partly also due to cost cutting.

how are you so confident about that?

Straight from Sundar himself in https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-upda...

> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power

Translation: we cannot release our full model because it costs too much. We are giving the world a cheap and worse version due to cost cutting.

> It’s critical that we bring experiences rooted in these models to the world in a bold and responsible way. That’s why we’re committed to developing AI responsibly

Translation: we value responsible AI so much that we'd nerf the capability of the AI to be "responsible"

If someone more ambitious than Sundar were to be CEO I'm sure the recent events would turn out very differently.

ChatGPT is also lighweight model, but it visibly outperforms Bard.

Their current generative AI is weaker because they were focused on many other facets of AI such as AlphaFold and Waymo.

where they didn't create positive revenue products yet despite billions of investments, while putting main cash cow (search) into risk by neglecting that area.

Google went slow not due to ethics but because running neural inference is a lot more expensive than serving SERP data from cache.

You honestly suggesting the inventors of the TPU bailed because they couldn't foot the compute bill?

They use a lot of machine learning for ads and YouTube recommendations - the TPU makes sense there and if anything shows how hard they try to keep costs down. It’s a no-brainer for them to have tried keeping Search as high-margin as possible for as long as possible.

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